The Rule of Reason

Thursday, December 01, 2016

With all apologies to Terence Rattigan, I have appropriated the title
of one of his earliest and unpublished plays. This is a post I’ve been wanting
to write for a long while, but other writing priorities kept cropping up.

In the anarchic apocalyptic milieu of The Walking Dead,
the hit TV-AMC series, which I have ceased watching regularly, the few heroes
who dominated the series for a few years and who were the main attraction (for
me, at least) have been demoted from taking life-preserving actions and moral
certitude to mere “guest appearances.” I have also stopped viewing it because a
new element has been introduced, one that violates my own story-telling
premises. Namely, giving evil center stage as the prime mover of the action.

The prime mover is Negan, in this instance, a kind of warlord who runs
an army of thugs and killers out of his Sanctuary, raids peaceful communities
of survivors, and demands half of what they have as the price of not
slaughtering them. Negan brandishes a baseball bat wreathed in barbed wire. In effect, those who submit – literally, Islam
style – to Negan become his slaves. Beginning with the last episode of Season 6
and the brutal, raw beginning of Season 7, the glib malevolence of Negan is
repulsive to me.

I won’t recap the story line up to this point. What has fascinated me
has been how Negan’s army – the “Saviors,” obeys his every command and whim.
And most of his army is armed, variously with spears (manufactured by a subject
agricultural community), pistols, and automatic rifles. I often asked myself: Negan wields a mere baseball bat and maybe a pistol under his belt, and wields
psychological hegemony over his followers. But his followers are armed and
could kill him in a second. Why do they tolerate his head-bashing tyranny, when
they could easily free themselves of his dictatorship?

Negan is a vile, evil character
who debuted in April at the end of Season Six of The
Walking Dead. Negan is a brutal tyrant who lords over an enclave of plague
survivors and likes to smash victims’ heads with a baseball bat sheathed in
barbed wire. He has a policy of extortion that requires other, productive
enclaves to give him half of what they have in exchange for his not raiding,
raping, enslaving, and killing their inhabitants and trashing their communities….

And here is…an uncensored
version of how he terrorizes, humiliates, and taunts his captured victims.
Please excuse the language. This version was recorded from a TV. I do not know
its source. It is compelling because Negan expresses Hillary’s malevolence, and
Negan’s foul language has also been captured elsewhere as Hillary’s.Negan is the real Hillary Clinton’s fantasy
surrogate. It is what she is at the core. Negan is artfully glib, almost
poetic, as Hillary is consistently plastic and artificial.

What might mystify people reading a history of Nazi Germany or Red
China is why uncountable millions would bow voluntarily and without hesitation
to a single allegedly charismatic person such as Negan, Hitler, and Stalin,
when a simple revolution would overpower the creature.

The answer is that these millions, once they have gotten over their
fear and doubts, become comfortable
with tyranny. Or they become so amenable to it that they remain clueless and
ignorant of what else might be possible to them. Memory of their previous lives,
as relatively free men, fades and vanishes. All that is left to them is to obey
Negan because his looters policy allows them to continue living.

In one episode, Negan gives a hubristic speech to the mob claiming
that his “Saviors” are saving civilization. His mob swallows that line with a
collective straight face.

The Walking Dead Hitler
in action

Of course, The Walking Dead
(TWD) is, on the surface, a dramatization of emergency
ethics. Emergency ethics is a temporary set of moral rules that can govern
one’s decisions and actions. A nickname or metaphor for emergency ethics is “lifeboat ethics.”
Unfortunately, the subject has been monopolized by left-wing environmentalists
and other confusing writers. In this instance, the circumstances are the collapse
of civilized society because most people become flesh-eating zombies while they
are alive or after they die.

No generation has viewed
the problem of the survival of the human species as seriously as we have.
Inevitably, we have entered this world of concern through the door of metaphor.
Environmentalists have emphasized the image of the earth as a spaceship
-Spaceship Earth. Kenneth Boulding (1966) is the principal architect of this
metaphor. It is time, he says, that we replace the wasteful "cowboy
economy" of the past with the frugal "spaceship economy"
required for continued survival in the limited world we now see ours to be. The
metaphor is notably useful in justifying pollution control measures.

Unfortunately, the
image of a spaceship is also used to promote measures that are suicidal. One of
these is a generous immigration policy, which is only a particular instance of
a class of policies that are in error because they lead to the tragedy of the
commons (Hardin 1968). These suicidal policies are attractive because they mesh
with what we unthinkingly take to be the ideals of "the best people".
What is missing in the idealistic view is an insistence that rights and
responsibilities must go together. The "generous" attitude of all too
many people results in asserting inalienable rights while ignoring or denying
matching responsibilities.

For the metaphor of
a spaceship to be correct, the aggregate of people on board would have to be
under unitary sovereign control (Ophuls 1974). A true ship always has a
captain. It is conceivable that a ship could be run by a committee. But it
could not possibly survive if its course were determined by bickering tribes
that claimed rights without responsibilities.

Bowing to Satan or to Negan or to Allah

Does it matter which to a cultist?

See what I mean? Go ahead and parse the passage. I won’t.

Aside from fighting off “zombies” or “the walking dead,” the core
group of survivors in TWD must also deal with marauding looters and killers and
the irrational foibles of members of its group.

An emergency is an
unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under
which human survival is impossible — such as a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a
shipwreck. In an emergency situation, men’s primary goal is to combat the
disaster, escape the danger and restore normal conditions (to reach dry land,
to put out the fire, etc.). [Currently, the unlimited immigration of illegals
and Muslims into the U.S., which certainly qualifies as an “emergency” because
on the one hand, Muslims adhere to an ideology hostile to American values,
which ideology requires the subornation and overthrow of the Constitution and
the institutionized violation of individual rights, and on the other hand
illegals who come to attach themselves to the welfare state and who have no
allegiance to America as a free, unbalkandizedcountry].

By “normal”
conditions I mean metaphysically normal, normal in the nature of things,
and appropriate to human existence. Men can live on land, but not in water or
in a raging fire. Since men are not omnipotent, it is metaphysically possible
for unforeseeable disasters to strike them, in which case their only task is to
return to those conditions under which their lives can continue. By its nature,
an emergency situation is temporary; if it were to last, men would perish.

It is only in
emergency situations that one should volunteer to help strangers, if it is in one’s power. For instance, a man who
values human life and is caught in a shipwreck, should help to save his fellow
passengers (though not at the expense of his own life). But this does not mean
that after they all reach shore, he should devote his efforts to saving his
fellow passengers from poverty, ignorance, neurosis or whatever other troubles
they might have. Nor does it mean that he should spend his life sailing the
seven seas in search of shipwreck victims to save . . . .[Italics
mine]

Emergency ethics are not normal ethics by which to live.

The U.S. has no moral duty to help strangers of whatever character, be
they refugees from the Mideast or from south of the border. But our government,
and that of many European nations, has inversed the altruist ethics vis-à-vis
emergency ethics to invite the ethically lame, the barbarously halt, and the
primitively savage to engulf their civilized societies with the consequence that
the “immigrants” not only imperil indigenous citizens, but form political blocs
to alter the political structures of those countries. Taking the suicidal
altruistic inversion further (altruism, straight up, shaken not stirred), the
code commands the governments to protect the invaders based on their “needs,”
and not its own citizens and to punish or penalize citizens who resist or criticize
the destruction of their values and societies. To become “Islamophobic” or “illegalphobic”
is deemed a wrong not to be countenanced or tolerated.

Why do whole populations – or armies of “Saviors” – submit to the
commands of their dictators? The answers
– and there have been numerous answers – are various. One student of the
phenomenon, Geotz Aly, a lecturer at the University of Frankfurt, posited that
Germans warmed up to Hitler because he was a “good provider”:

To do so, he gave
them (Germans) huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today
anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war not a
single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his
12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people. He also — in
great contrast to World War I — particularly pampered soldiers and their
families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits that
American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a
"warm-hearted" protector, says Aly, author of the new book
"Hitler’s People’s State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism"
[TC: I cannot find it on U.S. Amazon, try this
German link] and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt.
They were only too happy to overlook the Third Reich’s unsavory, murderous
side.

Financing such home
front "happiness" was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it
by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered
lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis
exploited it fully, he says.

Negan – like Hitler – had to ensure the loyalty and obedience of his
Saviors by distributing the loot from others to sustain their relatively above-bare
sustenance existence (safe places to sleep, food, other “necessities,” and
diversions). Ian
Kershaw, the prominent historian, on the other hand, noted that submission
to Hitler was not by all means universal.,

The referendum that followed on 19 August
1934, to legitimize the power-political change that had occurred, aimed at
demonstrating this identity. "Hitler for Germany -- all of Germany of
Hitler" ran the slogan. As the result showed, however, reality lagged
behind propaganda. According to the official figures, over a sixth of voters
defied the intense pressure to conform and did not vote "yes." In
some big working-class areas of Germany, up to a third had not given Hitler
their vote. Even so, there were one or two tantalizing hints that Hitler's
personal appeal outstripped that of the Nazi regime itself, and even more so of
the Party. "For Adolf Hitler yes, but a thousand times no to the brown
big-wigs" was scribbled on one ballot-paper in Potsdam. The same sentiment
could be heard elsewhere.

Beneath the veneer
of Führer adulation constantly trumpeted by the uniform propaganda of the mass
media, there are numerous indicators that Hitler's appeal remained far less
than total, even in what later memory often recalled as the "good
years" of the mid-1930s. One example of strong criticism leveled at Hitler
can be seen in a report from the Gestapo in Berlin in March 1936. Hitler's
toleration of the corruption and luxury life-style of the Party big-wigs at a
time when poor living standards still afflicted most ordinary Germans was, the
report noted, heavily criticized. "Why does the Führer put up with
that?" was a question on many people's lips, noted the report, and it was
evident "the trust of the people in the personality of the Führer is
currently undergoing a crisis."

The wholesale surrender of Germans (and of Italians to Mussolini, and
of Argentines to Peron, of the Chinese to Mao, etc.) to Hitler can be ascribed
in part to a pathological absence of individualism among the masses, and a dire
absence of any kind of self-esteem among them as volitional men, that is, of
the view that individuals were responsible for their own beliefs and actions,
and not a dictator or a strongman like Negan.

Mass submission to a “leader” also incorporates the psychological
phenomenon of a cult, in which individuals see their salvation and mental and
material contentment in the form of an irrational obsession with a “leader,”
who can solve all problems and work astounding miracles. It would be easy to
picture Hitler or Negan as infallible, and not to be questioned or criticized, and
not just from fear of him. Islam treats Mohammad that way; Mohammad is seen by Muslims
as infallible, and their relative mental and material well-being depends on
their dependence on that infallibility. As many Germans became psychologically
dependent on Hitler, and would resist or refuse to question his actions even
when they were disastrous, so the Saviors refuse to question the “practicality”
of looting or destroying the productive who made it possible for them to eat
and thrive.

The mass surrender of Americans to Hillary Clinton during the 2016
election is another case in point. Even though it is virtually common knowledge
that she is corrupt and is a congenital liar and that her policies would, like Obama’s,
leave them impoverished, and also in danger from ISIS, they’re obsessed with
her, and won’t let her go. Their identities have substance only in reference to
her image, to her icon. The fruitless and pointless Jill
Stein recount effort is demonstrable of that obsession. Clinton is a kind
of cult figure, as well. The violent Social Justice Warriors and her meeker
followers are not so much for her as against everything she isn’t.

They wish to follow their leader into oblivion like a million lemmings.

Friday, November 25, 2016

It is interesting that a number of signatories of the Declaration of
Independence later in their careers took actions that jeopardized the
foundations of liberty, and specifically of freedom of speech, or the First
Amendment of the Constitution.

The greatest enemy
of liberty is fear. When people feel comfortable and well protected, they are
naturally expansive and tolerant of one another’s opinions and rights. When they
feel threatened, their tolerance shrinks. By 1798, the euphoria surrounding the
American Revolution, the sense of common purpose and a common enemy, was gone. Everyone
agreed that the new nation, founded amid high hopes and noble ideas was in
danger of collapse. The one thing they could not agree on was who to blame. (p.
1)

What went on in the mid- to late-1790s has reverse parallels today.
Where the Mainstream Media (MSM) today, by its own admission, intervened to
slander, libel, and smear presidential candidate Donald Trump (now the
President-Elect), to aid in and guarantee the election of a criminally
irresponsible, scandal-rich, unstable Hillary Clinton, the Democratic
candidate, the writers and newspapers of the 18th century came under vicious
attack from the government and the Federalists, the party of John Adams, who as
President signed the Alien and Sedition
Acts passed by Congress. The MSM failed ingloriously in its efforts. But
Adams, who was the main target of criticism by “Republican” (the name of the
early Democratic Party) writers and newspapers, unleashed the dogs of
censorship on them when he
signed the Alien and Sedition Acts on June 18th, 1798.

The Sedition Act outlawed what one could call the 18th century
equivalent of “hate speech.” It was impermissible and punishable now to hate
President John Adams (the second President after George Washington) and the
Federalists and their national and foreign policies, and to voice one’s anathema
for them in print or vocally. Those who did so and drew the attention of large
numbers of people were arrested and jailed. Adams and the Federalists would not
otherwise have heard or read the dissatisfaction but for informers who reported
the transgressions to Adams and his political allies.

A history of that time, Liberty’s
First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech,
by Charles Slack, came my way
and further educated me on the pernicious consequences of the Sedition Act of
1798 and the scope of the evil. The consequences and injustices were wider than
I had previously imagined. As Slack points out, one need not have been a conspicuous,
widely known opponent of Adams, the Federalists, and the Sedition Act to attract
the attentions of the 18th century speech “police.” An idle, disparaging remark
overheard and reported by a neighbor could land the speaker in jail and earn an
enormous fine, as well.

Here is the key section of the Sedition Act under which several men
were prosecuted and jailed for “blaspheming” the government, President Adams,
and other individuals in the government.

SEC.
2. And be it farther enacted, That if any person shall write, print, utter or
publish, or shall cause or procure to be
written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist
or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and
malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or
either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the
United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of
the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them,
into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of
them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up
sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations
therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of
the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of
the powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to
resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any
hostile designs of any foreign nation against United States, their people or
government, then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the
United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding
two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years. [Italics
mine]

Although Adams
signed the Alien (or “Naturalization” Act), but did not enforce it, it was the
Sedition Act that drew the chief attention and ire of its foes and was the tool
Adams used to retaliate against his and his administration’s vociferous
critics. It is the Sedition Act that is the focus here.

Associate Supreme Court
Justice Samuel Chase, who

presided over the prosecution
of men for violating the

Sedition Act

The Alien and
Sedition Acts were promoted and passed by the Federalists in Congress, who were
the majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Federalists also
dominated the Supreme Court. All the men
tried under the Sedition Act were tried by Federalist appointees. The legislation was
passed because Adams and many Federalists thought that a war with France (and
possibly another with Britain) was imminent, and so extraordinary restraints on
speech and the press were justified. French privateers raided American
shipping. The French, once an ally who helped Americans win the Revolution,
were now hostile to the U.S.The French
had undergone a revolution of its own. Its reign of terror
horrified Adams and the Federalists. The French bridled under American
criticisms of the conduct of the revolutionary government and became so hostile
to the U.S. that the government refused to receive or acknowledge the new
ambassadors from America, instigating the X,Y,Z Affair, during
which the French foreign minister’s agents sought to bribe the American
diplomats before negotiations for more amicable relations could even commence. Feeling that war was certain, and smarting
from the Republicans’ criticisms, the Federalists wrote and got passed the
Sedition Act, on July 4th, 1798.

Its known and principal victims, all of
whom argued that the Sedition Act was a violation of the First Amendment
(Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging
the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances). There might have been many more victims, but
records from the period are incomplete. The better known, as detailed and
described by Charles Slack, were:

Matthew Lyon, an Irish immigrant and a
Democratic-Republican congressman from Vermont. He was the first individual to
be placed on trial under the Alien and Sedition Acts He was indicted in 1800
for an essay he had written in the Vermont Journal accusing the administration
of "ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice." Lyon
was always spoiling for a “fight” against the Federalists. He spit on a Federalist
political foe, Roger Griswold, on the floor of the House; Griswold retaliated
by taking a cane to Lyon. Griswold was not charged with any misconduct. Found
guilty of violating the Sedition Act, Lyon was fined $1,000 and sentenced to
four months in prison. From inside his jail cell, Lyon won reelection to
Congress for Vermont. He later in life moved family, business, and home to
Kentucky.

James Thomson Callender, a
Scottish citizen and immigrant, had been expelled from Great Britain for his
political writings. Living first in Philadelphia, then seeking refuge close by
in Virginia, he wrote a book titled The Prospect Before Us (read and
approved by Vice President Jefferson before publication) in which he called the
Adams administration a "continual tempest of malignant passions" and
the President a "repulsive pedant, a gross hypocrite and an unprincipled
oppressor." Callender, already residing in Virginia and writing for the
"Richmond Examiner," was indicted in mid 1800 under the Sedition Act
and convicted, fined $200, and sentenced to nine months in jail.

Benjamin Franklin Bache, a
grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was a printer and editor of the "Aurora,"
a Democratic-Republican newspaper. Bache had accused George
Washington of incompetence and financial irregularities, and "the
blind, bald, crippled, toothless, querulous Adams" of nepotism and
monarchical ambition. He was arrested in 1798 under the Sedition Act, but he
died of yellow fever before trial. Bache’s widow, Margaret, inherited the
“Aurora” and picked up where her late husband left off, excoriating Adams and
the Federalists.

Anthony Haswell was an
English immigrant and a printer in Vermont. Among other activities, Haswell
reprinted parts of the "Aurora," including Bache's claim that the
federal government had employed Tories. Haswell was found guilty of seditious libel by judge William Paterson, and sentenced to a
two-month imprisonment and a $200 fine.

Luther Baldwin, a river
boat man who made his living plying the waters carrying passengers and trade up
and down various rivers including the Hudson, was indicted, convicted, and
fined $100 for a drunken incident that occurred during a visit by President
Adams to Newark, New Jersey. Upon hearing a gun report, fired during an
artillery salute during a parade, he yelled "I hope it hit Adams in the
arse."

David Brown, in November
1798, led a group in Dedham, Massachusetts, including Benjamin Fairbanks, in setting up a liberty
pole with the words, "No Stamp Act, No Sedition Act, No Alien Bills,
No Land Tax, downfall to the Tyrants of America; peace and retirement to the
President; Long Live the Vice President." Liberty Poles sprouted all over
the colonial landscape before and during the Revolution, but the Federalists
saw them now as incitements to civil disobedience and sedition. Brown was
arrested in Andover, Massachusetts, but because he could not afford the $4,000
bail, he was taken to Salem for trial. Brown was tried in June 1799. Brown
pleaded guilty, but Justice Samuel Chase asked him to name others who had assisted
him. Brown refused, was fined $480, and sentenced to eighteen months in prison,
the most severe sentence ever imposed under the Sedition Act.

John
Adams and Benjamin Franklin read and

revise
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence

Thomas Cooper, an associate
of Joseph Priestly,
the noted scientist who with Cooper moved to America in 1793 to escape
persecution in England, was arrested for questioning Adams’s declaration of a “National
Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer.” In a local newspaper he questioned the
propriety of the declaration. Cooper was arrested, tried and jailed in
Philadelphia by Samuel Chase of the Supreme Court for violating the Sedition Act.

Writes Slack,

It had been passed “in
defiance of the plain and obvious meaning of the words of the constitution.”

…To Cooper freedom
of speech had a deeper meaning and purpose than just ensuring open government. At
stake was the right to of each individual to his own life, to form his thoughts
and express them as he pleased. The most insidious aspect of the Sedition Act,
he believed, was its direct transfer of rights from the speaker or writer to a
faceless, unaccountable mob. Cooper saw in the law an invitation to tyranny in
which unaccountable, ignorant men would pass judgment on “the most elegant
writer.” Cooper added, “They may find him guilty of what they do not
understand.” (p. 190)

Cooper was reminding his readers that Adams’s declaration was a sign of
where religion and rights “should not go,” that there should be a separation of
church and state, as expressed in the First Amendment.

Another outspoken enemy of the Sedition Act was Charles Hay, who
served as James Callender’s defense attorney, wrote andpublished a long essay, An
Essay on the Liberty of the Press, and in it offers one of the best
intellectual defenses of the freedom of speech of the period.

As Slack writes, Hay’s explication of the Bill of Rights, especially
of the First Amendment, in relation to the repressive Sedition Act, “galvanized”
the distinction.

“The words, ‘freedom
of the press,’ like most other words, have a meaning, a clear, precise, and
definite meaning, which the times require, should be unequivocally ascertained,”
Hay wrote. “That this has not been done before, is a wonderful and melancholy evidence
of the imbecility of the human mind.”

Hay continued: “This
argument may be summed up in a few words. The word ‘freedom’ has meaning. It is
either absolute, that is exempt from all law, or it is qualified, that is,
regulated by law. If it be exempt from the control of law, the Sedition Bill
which controls the ‘freedom of the press’ is unconstitutional. But if it is to
be regulated by law, the amendment which declares that Congress shall make no
law to abridge the freedom of the press, which freedom may however be regulated
by law, is the greatest absurdity that ever was conceived by the human mind.”

…Likewise, “if the
words freedom of the press, have any meaning at all, they mean the total
exemption from any law making any publication whatever criminal,” since the
only way to stifle objectionable voices would be to exercise “a power fatal to the
liberty of the people.” (pp. 170-172)

Hay does not state it, but he meant by that fatal power: by force.

Clearly something had
to be done to silence Matthew Lyon, Bache, Callender, and others. Vice
President Jefferson sensed the coming storm, noting in a letter to James
Madison, that President Adams “May look to the Sedition bill which has been
spoken of, and which may be meant to put the Printing presses under the
Imprimatur of the executive. Bache is thought to be a main object of it.” (Jefferson
to Madison, May 3, 1798) (pp. 64-65)

Thomas Jefferson, the Republican

enemy of John Adams, a Federalist

One of Jefferson’s
first acts as President in 1801 was to grant general pardons to any surviving,
jailed victims of the Sedition Act, which expired on March 31st, 1801, “written
into it to coincide with Adams’s last day in office,” notes Slack. “The pardon
automatically freed the two remaining prisoners who remained in jail: James T.
Callender and David Brown.” (p. 224)

Charles Slack’s opus is highly recommended
for anyone who wishes to understand the struggle to defend freedom of speech
and of the press over two hundred years ago, and to better grasp how low the
press has stooped to ally itself with parties hostile to freedom of speech and
of the press.

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Edward Cline, American Novelist

Edward Cline was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
in 1946. After graduating from high school (in which he learned nothing
of value) and a stint in the Air Force, he pursued his ambition to
become a novelist. His first detective novel, First Prize, was published
in 1988 by Mysterious Press/Warner Books, and his first suspense novel,
Whisper the Guns, was published in 1992 by The Atlantean Press. First
Prize was republished in 2009 by Perfect Crime. The Sparrowhawk series
of novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period
has garnered critical acclaim (but not yet from the literary
establishment) and universal appreciation from the reading public,
including parents, teachers, students, scholars, and adult readers who
believe that American history has been abandoned or is misrepresented by
a government-dominated educational establishment. He is dedicated to
Objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason in all matters.